So we host a couple of websites for various things, alongside this blog. For many years I have hosted this blog on my Proxmox server. This ran Apache in an LXC container which doubled as a reverse proxy and other things. Having been dabbling with more powerful reverse proxying on my internal network (Another blog post to come soon…) I started taking things off the container.

It would have stayed that way if it wasn’t for a slightly crap support experience with Vultr. These guys are…fine…for renting a VPS. I had a Wordpress site with them that was coming to the end of it’s life. It ran Ubuntu 20.04, which is EOL this year and I figured I’d just spin up whatever the latest one-click Wordpress image they had and migrate over. Except, when the image was spun up it didn’t seem to have Wordpress running on it. I fire off a support request and they respond by asking me to open ports 80 and 443. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be much of a problem for me ($ sudo ufw 80 443), but this is their default install image! Surely it should just work already…Anyway, the ufw rule didn’t work and I figured I’m kinda done. What with Vultr bringing some negative publicity their own way with changes to TOS, I figured it’s time to just find a new VPS provider.

I have settled on 1984, a hosting provider in Iceland. They have strong principles regarding privacy and they run on renewable energy, which is a nice bonus.*

It means that the Wordpress blog will have to be converted to Markdown as I don’t really want to deal with a full CMS anymore either. Using Hugo (my preferred static site generator) will mean that the site is able to withstand any shenanigans in the future - it’s just HTML files! I started the process using wordpress-export-to-markdown which seems to work really well. It’ll still take a little while to get everything migrated over, but I think it will be worth it. I already moved this blog over to the new VPS (this site is written in Hugo anyway).

Lastly, I’m super impressed at getting caddy set up to serve webpages. Having messed about with Apache, NGINX, Nginx Proxy Manager and then getting Let’s Encrypt working on various setups over the years, Caddy was super refreshing. When they claim it’s one line in a config file…that’s not a lie, it’s one line to get your site served…and it grabs a Let’s Encrypt certificate automatically. That’s amazing!

Anyway, I have some markdown and Hugo configs to write…

*I figure that the prime source of renewable energy in Iceland is…geo-thermal? Is this blog now powered by magma from the Earth’s core?? If so…that’s pretty cool.